Wideband wireless communication systems operate in a variety of environments. In one environment, a stationary base station (BS) acts as data communication access point for mobile stations (MS's). Each device on the wireless communication link employs a channel estimation algorithm to compensate for environmental effects such as multipath fading and/or Doppler delay.
To improve coherent detection of the channel information, some high data rate communication systems insert pilot signals into the data traffic streams for channel tracking or estimation. Generally, the channel time response or frequency response can be estimated based on the pilots if a sufficient number of pilot signals are used.
However, in certain practical applications, such as those in which transmissions are made in a small burst size or with dedicated pilots, there are a limited number of pilots available for channel estimation. Consequently, channel estimation techniques that require more pilots or training sequences are not effective for these kinds of applications. The distribution of pilots in a small burst may not satisfy the requirement for other widely used channel estimation techniques.
A technique is needed to estimate channel information based on channel information at pilot signals in a small or short transmission burst.